Palestinian Women Quotes

Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people. Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison; one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.

I am the interpretation of the prophet I am the artist in the coffin I am the brave flag stained with blood I am the wounds overcome I am the dream refusing to sleep I am the bare-breasted voice of liberty I am the comic the insult and the laugh I am the right the middle and the left I am the poached eggs in the sky I am the Parisian streets at night I am the dance that swings till dawn I am the grass on the greener lawn I am the respectful neighbour and the graceful man I am the encouraging smile and the helping hand I am the straight back and the lifted chin I am the tender heart and the will to win I am the rainbow in rain I am the human who won’t die in vain I am Athena of Greek mythology I am the religion that praises equality I am the woman of stealth and affection I am the man of value and compassion I am the wild horse ploughing through I am the shoulder to lean onto I am the Muslim the Jew and the Christian I am the Dane the French and the Palestinian I am the straight the square and the round I am the white the black and the brown I am the free speech and the free press I am the freedom to express I will die for my right to be all the above here mentioned And should threat encounter I’ll pull my pencil

was a female Palestinian suicide bomber clutching a rifle in one hand and her little son in the other. This, it seemed, was the state’s only vision of gender equality. Ahmadinejad instituted separate elevators for men and women in government buildings, and he fired swaths of municipal workers who were not religious or devoted enough to his ideology. Tehran

No one looks at an olive tree and asks why it hides it fruits. It blossoms when its ready and under the right conditions.

Again, we are talking about a woman with Palestinian heritage expected to show deference, if not all-out reverence, to a politician who has shown little concern for her people simply because that politician is a (white) liberal woman. Predictably, Tlaib was hounded online and off until she apologized. Never mind that her own actions came after months of Clinton injecting herself into the 2020 campaign by repeatedly taking swipes at Sanders.

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in Pity the Nation: They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.

White/Western feminism's attempt at erasing the political context of Palestinian women's oppression was evident yet again around the 2017 Women's March on Washington, when liberal feminists objected to the leadership of Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, and the newly minted "Zionesses" complained of "antisemitism" because Palestinian women's circumstances were on the platform, as part of a broader discussion of US President Donald Trump's Muslim ban and the overall Islamophobia he pandered to.

The report defines acts of ethnic cleansing as including the separation of men from women, the detention of men, and the destruction of houses and their repopulation by another ethnic group later on. This was precisely the repertoire of the Jewish soldiers in the 1948 war.

While George W. Bush was in power, the killing of women and babies in Gaza could be justified by the American administration as being part of a holy war against Islam (a practice not alien to the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan) under the banner of fighting terrorism.

In the United States, Canada, and Australia, fewer than 3 percent of women report that their partners assaulted them in the previous year, but the reports from other countries are an order of magnitude higher: 27 percent in a Nicaraguan sample, 38 percent in a Korean sample, and 52 percent in a Palestinian sample.

I don’t think I expect much from the world, until Palestinian interests align with superpowers' interests, we are not going to get much. So, focus on the little things, what can I as a person do? How can I change somebody’s life? How can I influence somebody’s perception of who Palestinians are? What we are all about?

They did not overthrow the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran; support the genocide of eight hundred thousand leftists in Indonesia; intervene on behalf of the fascist Phalange against the Palestinians in Lebanon; fight a dirty war against Dhofarian insurgents; underwrite absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, the shah of Iran, Morocco, and the Gulf Emirates; build with billions of U.S. tax dollars the golden throne upon which Mubarak sits like a modern-day pharaoh; arm Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and turn a blind eye to his genocide against the communists and Kurds; then kill seventeen thousand Iraqi civilians in bombing raids during the Gulf War, including more than four hundred women and children incinerated in the Amariyah bomb shelter. Nor did they stir the Shias of southern Iraq into revolt, then abandon them to Saddam Hussein’s executioners because George Bush senior calculated that the total destruction of the regime would create an impermissible power vacuum that Iran might rush to fill.

The wars around the globe into which religion is woven -- violence that over the past two decades has sent many tens of thousands of men, women, and children to terrible deaths in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the United States -- deeply threaten what we have of a human society. Denouncing religion itself is futile. And such simple reactions badly miss the point. It is among the religious believers that the work must be done, within that overwhelming majority who would find common ground in being human and not wanting destruction, if only because their traditions are about so much more. Those traditions contain life-giving possibilities, even if the worst demagogues would try to twist dogma so hard as to wring poison from it.

Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before. Yet this was an age in which men and women were being pushed toward ever-narrower definitions of themselves, encouraged to call themselves just one thing, Serb or Croat or Israeli or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Baha'i or Jew, and the narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them. Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war. There were plenty of people who didn't want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back. And yet they did what they had to do, even at the price of their own ease, and sometimes their lives.

The “Muslim speech,” as we took to calling the second major address, was trickier. Beyond the negative portrayals of terrorists and oil sheikhs found on news broadcasts or in the movies, most Americans knew little about Islam. Meanwhile, surveys showed that Muslims around the world believed the United States was hostile toward their religion, and that our Middle East policy was based not on an interest in improving people’s lives but rather on maintaining oil supplies, killing terrorists, and protecting Israel. Given this divide, I told Ben that the focus of our speech had to be less about outlining new policies and more geared toward helping the two sides understand each other. That meant recognizing the extraordinary contributions of Islamic civilizations in the advancement of mathematics, science, and art and acknowledging the role colonialism had played in some of the Middle East’s ongoing struggles. It meant admitting past U.S. indifference toward corruption and repression in the region, and our complicity in the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government during the Cold War, as well as acknowledging the searing humiliations endured by Palestinians living in occupied territory. Hearing such basic history from the mouth of a U.S. president would catch many people off guard, I figured, and perhaps open their minds to other hard truths: that the Islamic fundamentalism that had come to dominate so much of the Muslim world was incompatible with the openness and tolerance that fueled modern progress; that too often Muslim leaders ginned up grievances against the West in order to distract from their own failures; that a Palestinian state would be delivered only through negotiation and compromise rather than incitements to violence and anti-Semitism; and that no society could truly succeed while systematically repressing its women. —

The Women in Black are Israeli Jews who meet wall in Jerusalem. They meet every Friday, the Sabbath evening, and pray. They begin by singing Kaddish for all the Israelis killed in the fighting in Israel that week. When they are finished, they pause and read all the names. Then, they turn again to face the wall and sing Kaddish again, this time for all of Palestinians killed in the fighting that week, and they turn when they are finished and once again recite the litany of the names of those killed.

The 2018 election also saw victory for Palestinian American and Detroit native Rashida Tlaib. Like Omar, her election should not have come as such a surprise; she was well known and respected in her prior role as a state representative, regarded as someone who would vigorously fight for Detroit. She was a thorn in the side of big businesses that tried to exploit or neglect Detroit neighborhoods and an even bigger thorn in the side of Donald Trump. When Tlaib won her bid for Congress, representing Michigan’s Thirteenth District, she became the first Palestinian American to sit in Congress. She and Omar became the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.

While George W. Bush was in office, the killing of women and babies in Gaza could be accepted even by the American administration as part of that holy war against Islam. The worst month in 2006 for the Gazans was September, when this new pattern in the Israeli policy became all too obvious. Almost daily, civilians were killed by the IDF: 2 September 2006 was one such day. Three citizens were killed and an entire family injured in Beit Hanoun. This was just the morning’s harvest; before the end of the day many more were killed. In September an average of eight Palestinians died every day in Israeli attacks on the Strip, many of them children. Hundreds were maimed, wounded and paralysed

What can Black feminism and the Black struggle offer to the Palestinian liberation movement? I don’t know whether I would phrase the question in that way, because I think that solidarity always implies a kind of mutuality. Given the fact that in the US we’re already encouraged to assume that we have the best of everything, that US exceptionalism puts us in a situation as activists to offer advice to people struggling all over the world, and I don’t agree with that—I think we share our experiences. Just as I think the development of Black feminism and women-of-color feminisms can offer ideas, experiences, analyses to Palestinians, so can Black feminisms and women-of-color feminisms learn from the struggle of the Palestinian people and Palestinian feminists.

This is an ancient text that corrects an even more ancient text. And now we read this ancient text in our contemporary moment of deciding. Ours is a time of scattering in fear. We are so fearful that we want to fence the world in order to keep all the others out: –Some of the church still wants to fence out women. –We build fences to keep out immigrants (or Palestinians). –The church in many places fences out gays. –The old issue of race is still powerful for fencing. We have so many requirements that are as old as Moses. But here is only one requirement. It is Sabbath, work stoppage, an ordinance everyone can honor—gay or straight, woman or man, Black or White, “American” or Hispanic—anybody can keep it and be gathered to the meeting of all of God’s people.

With Hamas now in control of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.25 What had begun with international refusal to recognize Hamas’s election victory had led to a disastrous Palestinian rupture and the blockade of Gaza. This sequence of events amounted to a new declaration of war on the Palestinians. It also provided indispensable international cover for the open warfare that was to come.

Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.

Israel is one of the most multiracial and multicultural countries in the world. More than a hundred different countries are represented in its population of 6 million. Consider how the Israeli government spent tens of millions of dollars airlifting more than forty thousand black Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984 and 1991. Since 2001 Israel has reached out to help others, taking in non-Jewish refugees from Lebanon, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Liberia, and Congo, and even Bosnian Muslims. How many such refugees have the twenty-two states in the Arab League taken in? The Arab world won’t even give Palestinian refugees citizenship in their host countries. Remember, Jews can’t live in the neighboring Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But Arabs are living as citizens in Israel. What does that tell you about their respect for other cultures? Over 1 million Arabs are full Israeli citizens. An Arab sits on the Supreme Court of Israel. There are Arab political parties expressing views inimical to the State of Israel sitting in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Women are equal partners in Israel and have complete human rights, as do gays and minorities. Show me an Arab nation with a Jew in its government. Show me an Arab country with half as many Jewish citizens as Israel has Arab citizens. Show me freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and human rights in any Arabic country in the Middle East the way they exist and are practiced in Israel. It is those same freedoms that the Muslims resent as a threat to Islam and that they are fighting against, be it in Israel, Europe, or the United States.

It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another ‘homeland’ created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing of the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posses an intimate knowledge of the streets of faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small human mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw our grandmothers quarter in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took of their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of ‘Ein al-Deir. The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colours, smell, and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows - once the adults had gone out of an evening were their weapons in a battle that had them shirking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror. The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine. I have always believed that it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed in the memory of its people into a bouquet of ’symbols’. Merely symbols, they will not allow us to develop our village so that it shares features with the city, or to move without city into a contemporary space. The Occupation forced us to remain with the old. That is its crime. It did not deprive us of the clay ovens of yesterday, but of the mystery of what we could invent tomorrow.

The Israeli border police guarding the central region near the Jordanian border had been told to take all measures necessary to keep order that evening. The local colonel, Issachar Shadmi, decided that this meant setting a curfew for Palestinian Arab villages, from five p.m. to six a.m. The news of the curfew was broadcast over the radio the same day it went into force. The border police unit commanders in the region were informed of the order by their commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki. Malinki implied that, in the event of anyone breaking the curfew, the police could shoot to kill. Several platoons were charged with informing villagers in person. At the village of Kfar Kassem (or Kafr Qasim), close to the border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, a platoon arrived to announce the news—but too late in the day. They were told that many of the village’s agricultural workers were already out at work, mostly picking olives. After five p.m., the villagers returned as expected: a mixed crowd of men and women, boys and girls, riding on bicycles, wagons, and trucks. Even though he knew these civilians would not have heard about the curfew through no fault of their own, the unit commander Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan determined that they were in violation of it and therefore should be shot. Out of all the unit commanders given this order, Dahan was the only one to enforce it.16 As each small group of villagers arrived, the border police opened fire. Forty-three civilians were killed and thirteen injured. The dead were mostly children aged between eight and seventeen: twenty-three of them, plus fourteen men and six women. It was said that one nine-year-old girl was shot twenty-eight times. Another little girl watched as her eleven-year-old cousin was shot. He was dragged indoors and died in his grandfather’s arms, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest. Laborers were ordered off their trucks in small groups, lined up, and executed. There were clashes between Arabs and border police that evening in which six more Arabs were killed. The order to kill had not come from the top. It was traced back conclusively only as far as Major Malinki. When Ben-Gurion heard about the massacre, he was furious, telling his cabinet that the officers who had shot civilians should be hanged in Kfar Kassem’s town square.17 Yet the Israeli government covered the incident up with a press blackout lasting two months.

There is much in Judeo-Christian doctrine and history that can be used to support a peace system, but it is so far a minor current. The main stream has adopted the violent, dominator mode of late Palestinian Judaism with its foundation in Old Testament holy war. It is a somber fact of history that in the name of Christ men have murdered and condoned murder, tortured women and children, slaughtered in war, and executed each other without remorse. The Crusaders saw Jesus in terms of their own society, that is, as their feudal lord.

* In 2012 fatah and Hamas forged unity agreement and accepted all of the demands of the quartet. Obama administration also approved this agreement threatened the long-term goal of dividing Gaza from the West Bank. Something had to be done, three Israeli boys were murdered in the West Bank the Netanyahu government had strong evidence that once they were dead but use the opportunity to launch a rampage in the West Bank. During the 18 day rampage Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians and killed six, Hamas finally reacted with its first rocket strikes in 19 months. This provided the pretext for operation protective edge on July 8 by the end of July 15 hundred Palestinians had been killed 70% of them were civilians including hundreds of women and children. Three civilians in Israel were killed. Large areas of Gaza were turned into rubble. Gauzes main power plant was attacked, which is a war crime rescue teams and ambulances were repeatedly attacked for hospitals were attacked another war crime. Are you in school was attacked harbouring 3300 refugees who had fled the ruins of their neighbourhoods on the orders of the Israeli army

Many Israelis expressed reservations about the removal of the civilians from Lydda and Ramle. One party leader did not accept Allon’s position that strategic needs justified the removal of thousands of women, children, and old men from their homes. A hardened military leader of the operation recalled his conflicting emotions: “For years you’ve trained for this day,” he explained. “You’ve been told there is an inevitable war coming. You’ve been told that the Arabs will have to go. And yet you are in shock. In Lydda, the war is as cruel as it can be. The killing, the looting, the feelings of rage and revenge. Then the column marching. And although you are strong and well-trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing.”21 Like Deir Yassin, Lydda remains one of the most controversial episodes in Israel’s history, causing much debate and internal anguish to this day, and continued condemnation from the Palestinians, more proof in their eyes of Zionist aggression.

Next came the physical and symbolic erasure of what was once a vigorous, pre-Nakba Palestinian civilization. All traces, memory, and records of the pastoral lifestyle of the Palestinian villages and their flourishing agriculture, and the emerging modernism that existed in Palestinian cities, which included abundant civic organizations, nationalist and women’s movements, and buds of economic development—all of it was done away with.

Naturally, at different centres of Palestinian Christianity the lists would differ. All agreed that Mary of Magdala was one of the number, but at one centre the names of local women would be remembered, and at another centre those of others. Luke’s (Caesarean) tradition preserved the names of Joanna and Susanna, Mark’s (Jerusalem) tradition a second Mary and Salome. (Taylor 1957, p. 652)

Among other things, Wilderson’s book is the story of an American who thinks of his Blackness as normative, and, therefore, as characteristic of Blackness around the world. (This mistake is familiar to me; I make it all the time.) Careful not to extend too much imaginative empathy to Palestinians, Chinese-Americans, white women, and sundry others, Wilderson is nonetheless quick to claim sameness with—impose analogy upon—a group of Black South Africans. He’s down on internationalism (a “talisman” that he has had to learn to “let go of”), but only to a point. Blackness, that fixity, that hole, is everywhere and always the same.

I will kill you. I don’t want to, but I will,” he said, cocking the hammer. “Do you really want to kill a million people? Women, children? Is that who you really are?” “Who I am?” she laughed, with a touch of hysteria. “Don’t you understand? That’s the whole point! I’m a Palestinian! Who am I? What am I? I don’t belong! Don’t you see? I don’t belong anywhere. No family, no country, nothing! I wanted to belong to you, that’s the horrible joke!” She laughed wildly. “To the enemy!

Our team walked through the women’s empowerment center, which was operating in a multistory building, one of the stops we were contemplating for the First Lady. The young man and woman escorting us took us to the roof as part of the tour. I looked out over the city, and other than the bright blue sea, most everything I saw was dusty, arid, and brown except, off in the distance, where I noticed a patch of vibrant green. There were nice buildings and what appeared to be trees and grass. It looked like a desert oasis, or a mirage. “What’s that?” I asked. “That,” our consul general said, “is an Israeli settlement.” “But it’s so green. I thought you said there was very little running water here.” “That’s right,” he said. “There’s limited running water here. The Israelis control the water so twenty times more goes there than comes here.” It was the first time I saw up close what it was like to live under the daily humiliation Palestinians had suffered for years. There it was, a better, easier life, starting right at them.

Prior to 9/11, Arab American comedian Dean Obeidallah did not see his Palestinian heritage as pertinent to his life; he felt and was treated as “white.” Following the attacks, however, his Arab heritage became an issue for others if not for him, prompting him to perform a stand-up routine on how he “went to bed a white guy” the night before 9/11 and “woke up an Arab” the morning after.

another Muslim woman took office alongside her. Rashida Tlaib, representative for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, was the other first Muslim woman in Congress. Rashida boasted yet another first: She was first in her family to graduate from high school. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, a single mother of two boys, and the oldest of fourteen children, Rashida had blasted through other people’s expectations of what it meant to be a Palestinian American woman. And at every step, she was taking all of her heritage with her, proudly representing Michigan and Palestine. At her congressional swearing-in ceremony, Rashida wore a floor-length, long-sleeved black and red thobe, the quintessentially Palestinian dress, which is typically hand-embroidered by women from Palestinian villages. The stitching and styles vary across Palestine, but thobes with lavish designs are worn to mark special occasions, such as puberty, motherhood, and now entry of a Palestinian American woman into the United States Congress. Rashida posted a close-up of her thobe on Instagram.

Dear Mr. President of the USA, Donald Trump Your Excellency, Equality, justice, harmony, and love, within the concept and context of security, and respect, are for the entire humanity, not only for the USA and its people. Global peace lies in a step that; pull out your troops from the Muslim States and stop interfering with its systems and way of life; all terrorists will disappear, and peace shall prevail. One should realize the atrocities of the Isreal, against Palestinians’ determination and India, against Kashmiris that the United Nations and its Security Council fail to resolve and solve those disputes under the umbrella of the USA. Consequently, each one of us faces the consequences. You, as a leader of the great nation, ought to be great and noble; it is possible if you change your distinctive thoughts and policies; you may change human history, becoming the historical leader of the entire humanity that suffers from injustice and hunger and death. As I know that Pakistan Armed forces have devotedly and significantly sacrificed along with the Armed Forces of the USA for global peace, so never degrade your national pride, ignoring, denying, and forgetting that the sacrifice of our men and women, which we are still paying. You should cooperate, instead of becoming influenced by the opposing third party, to accuse Pakistan. We are a peaceful nation and determined to stand along with the USA forces, to eliminate all sorts of terrorists, for world peace. God bless you. - Ehsan Sehgal

The women’s cell block we were in was designated for what Israel calls “security prisoners.” Israel classifies all the Palestinians it detains in its custody as “security prisoners,” regardless of their alleged offense or criminal activity. But Palestinians use “political prisoner” to describe those of us detained in relation to the occupation.

When I open my eyes, I see the Israeli soldiers patrolling the area by the spring on the street below. We’re the same age now, me and them, but our lives couldn’t be any further apart. I think about the teenage Israeli girls my age serving in Israel’s army, and I’m overcome with sadness. Despite the fact that they got to grow up with privileges and freedoms Palestinian children have never known, I truly feel sorry for them. The occupation has brainwashed them, both the men and the women. It threatens to rob them of their humanity and their conscience, and once you’ve lost those two things, you’ve lost everything that matters in life.

Activists from Baghdad to Berkeley to Brandeis are crying for sanctions and boycotts, effectively trying to stop Israel from helping the world and her neighbors advance in technology, healthcare, and agriculture, to stop Israelis from hiring Palestinians in Rawabi, and from helping traumatized Yazidi women.

emergence, Black women were frequently asked to choose whether the Black movement or the women’s movement was most important. The response was that this was the wrong question. The more appropriate question was how to understand the intersections and interconnections between the two movements. We are still faced with the challenge of understanding the complex ways race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability are intertwined—but also how we move beyond these categories to understand the interrelationships of ideas and processes that seem to be separate and unrelated. Insisting on the connections between struggles and racism in the US and struggles against the Israeli repression of Palestinians, in this sense, is a feminist process.

The fact that we were imprisoned in Israel, rather than in the occupied territories in which we lived and had been arrested, was a blatant violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That same article states that the occupying power is obligated to provide adequate medical care and special protection for women and child prisoners, which was not the case.

Some of the girls who served time with me had been arrested in the uprisings of 2015, accused of possessing knives and trying to carry out attacks against soldiers. But the overwhelming number of children are detained for participating in demonstrations and clashes, for creating social media posts Israel deems as incitement, or for “insulting the honor of a soldier.” Most of the time, they’re accused of throwing stones. Once a girl turned eighteen, she’d be transferred to another cell, one with adult women. Meanwhile, new girls would come and go, as some didn’t have long sentences. The other sections of the prison housed Israeli civilians who had committed criminal offenses. Despite their being housed in different cell blocks, we could easily hear their shouts and cries at all hours of the day and night.

Kristina, who lives in Germany, is from the Bronx, New York. Her mother is Indigenous El Salvadorian and her father is from Puerto Rico and has Palestinian Arab heritage. Though she identifies as Latina, she describes herself as ethnically ambiguous looking, which, she says leads to objectification and tokenization.

Chesler cites the claim by the Palestinian American writer Suha Sabbagh that Western feminists, simply by writing about Muslim women, exert "a greater degree of domination" over those women "than that actually exercised by men over women within Muslim culture." A brown woman in (say) some Pakistani village, then, is actually more oppressed by some white woman tapping away at a computer at some American university she's never heard of than by a man who's beating and raping her in her home.

The Bible is a profoundly liberating document, but there is no denying that it also contains deeply problematic texts—indeed, “texts of terror”2 that have adversely impacted the lives of women, slaves, Jews, Palestinians, Native Americans, and gays (to mention but a few). Such texts and prevalent interpretations of them may be described as “tyrannical” in the sense that they have legitimated the right of some to exercise unjust power or control over others. They

When you don’t stop evil in its tracks when you first recognize it, you will end up with a monster force that will spread its tentacles and affect the lives of millions. Because we did not want to judge evildoers such as the Palestinians bombing innocent Israelis, the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein gassing his own people, we have helped create the monsters we are dealing with today. Don’t be afraid to stand up and lift your head and be proud of what America and Western culture stand for. America did not pull itself out of the grip of tyranny and feudalism for nothing. America as a Western culture and as a nation is a tribute to men and women and God’s creation at its best.

It is my contention that Israel’s worst enemies, those who hurt her the most, are by far the ‘unJews’ -these are Jewish men and women known for their inferiority complex who crave for the world’s approval and who express loudly and sometimes violently their contempt against Israel and the Jewish identity. The reasons for this pathological behavior are complex. Their behavior seems to be driven by self-hatred and possibly has more to do with their rejection of God and traditional Judaism than their ‘passionate quest for justice’ and the support of the Palestinian cause. It is important to note that not all Arabs agree with the Muslim contention that Israel has no right to exist. Many Arabs are Christians, and most certainly do not accept the Islamists’ point of view. Many of the people incorrectly branded as Arabs, are actually Druze and Kurds, and most would also disagree with the anti-Israel stand held by the majority of the Muslim factions of the world. Furthermore, some Israeli-Arabs, even Muslims by faith, see themselves as regular Israeli citizens, and do not identify with the Palestinian people or their cause.

The Israeli social media strategy aimed to involve both domestic and global supporters of its military missions. By doing so, and asking backers to post their own supporting tweets, Face-book posts, or Instagram images, the IDF created a collective mission that other nations could easily mimic by stirring up nationalist fervor online. During Operation Pillar of Defense, the IDF encouraged supporters of Israel to both proudly share when “terrorists” were killed while at the same time reminding a global audience that the Jewish state was a victim. It was a form of mass conscription to the cause through the weaponization of social media.12 This was war as spectacle, and the IDF was spending big to make it happen. The IDF media budget allowed at least 70 officers and 2,000 soldiers to design, process, and disseminate official Israeli propaganda, and almost every social media platform was flooded with IDF content. Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.

The Great March of Return was both a lab and showroom. The most sophisticated new weapon used against the Palestinian protesters was the “Sea of Tears,” a drone that dropped tear gas canisters on a desired area. Despite Israeli claims of accuracy, a tent full of Palestinian women and children had tear gas dropped onto them, as did groups of reporters. Israeli police started using drones that dropped tear gas grenades on protestors in the West Bank in April 2021. One month later, Israel announced that a fleet of drones would be used to track riots and protests as well as areas damaged by rockets fired from Gaza. Israel announced in 2022 that it approved the use of armed drones for “targeted killings” in the West Bank. Reportedly tested over Gaza before the major protests began in 2018, a Chinese-made drone by Da Jiang Innovations was reconfigured by Israel’s Border Force, which was working with Israeli company Aeronautics to adapt the drone to on-the-ground service requirements. “Beyond the fact that it neutralizes all danger to our forces, it allows us to reach places that we had yet to reach,” Border Police Commander Kobi Shabtai told Israel’s Channel 2 news. The immediate effectiveness of the Sea of Tears led Maf’at, the Israeli Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure, to purchase hundreds of the drones after the first night of demonstrations in Gaza. Another innovation was the “skunk water” drone, a form of liquid emitted from a water cannon that left a foul smell on clothes and body for a long time. Israeli firm Aeronautics was behind this innovation, a technique that had been already used in the West Bank and Jerusalem to deter protestors. Reports appeared in early 2020 by anti-occupation activists in the West Bank that Israeli-controlled talking drones were flying overhead and sending out a “Go Home” message to Palestinian protestors. Israeli activists were told in Hebrew not to “stand with the enemy.

Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.

Using South African apartheid–era rhetoric to defend the Israeli occupation remains alive to this day. During the 2019 Israeli election campaign, opposition leader Benny Gantz criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for banning US Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering Israel and the Palestinian territories. Instead, Gantz said, both women should have been allowed to see “with their own eyes” that “the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is in Israel … and the second-best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is the West Bank.” This was reminiscent of South African apart-heid leader John Vorster statement to the New York Times in 1977 that “the standard of living of the South African Black is two to five times higher than that of any Black country in Africa.”14 One of the architects of apartheid in South Africa, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, wrote in the Rand Daily Mail in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apart-heid state” after taking Palestine from the Arabs who “had lived there for a thousand years.